Monthly Archives: October 2012

Oops. I forgot to post last Friday. I’ve cut down from every week to every-other-week, as some of readers may have noticed—but this is the first time since beginning this blog 18 months ago that I’ve completely forgotten. Last Friday, October 26, marked the twelfth anniversary of my mother’s death. She died at 11:35 a.m. on a Thursday, less than a month before “hanging chads” became front-page news and less than a year before my father almost boarded UAL flight 93 from Newark to SFO. Events of enormous consequence. Events that ushered in a new world. I would never minimize … Continue reading →

Last night, at a reading in Sausalito at the wonderful Why There Are Words series curated by Peg Alford Pursell, I ran into a former student. We chatted during the break, and she told me that since taking my class, she’d applied for and been accepted to three MFA programs in creative writing. This made me happy. I asked what she was working on, and she mentioned writing flash fiction. Flash fiction has always made me nervous. Not because I don’t like it, but because it intimidates me. Maybe it’s the word “flash,” which makes me think of Flash Gordon, … Continue reading →